Why WEC is in a great place heading into the Le Mans 24 Hours

“Execution, execution, execution.” Those were the words a senior engineer once chanted at me when I asked him about his team’s game plan for the race ahead. I think he was playing to prime minister-in-waiting Tony Blair’s famous “education, education, education” mantra ahead of the 1997 general election campaign in the UK, though I wasn’t entirely sure. His words came back to me on Saturday evening as BMW notched up its first overall World Endurance Championship victory of the modern era. Execution won the day for WRT at Spa.

I left the track thinking that Rene Rast, Sheldon van der Linde and Robjin Frijns had won the Spa 6 Hours without having the fastest car. Wrong! A bit of number crunching revealed that their BMW M Hybrid V8 was, in fact, the quickest Hypercar over the duration. But that’s not to take anything away from WRT for the alternate strategy. It was the secret of its success in Belgium.

Rast and his team-mates almost certainly wouldn’t have topped the averages had not the car been short-fuelled at the first round of pitstops, getting it out in free air. It allowed the drivers to exploit a car that had come alive in the hotter temperatures of race day after struggling through practice and qualifying. The winning Bimmer, don’t forget, only qualified 11th and was going nowhere during the opening hour, bottled up down in the pack.

Its drivers weren’t expecting to have such a quick car in the race, though they knew there was an off-kilter strategy on the table. It had been discussed pre-race. We all should have known that WRT would try something a bit different. It is, after all, a team that once sent Dries Vanthoor out on a bone-dry track at the Spa 24 Hours on wet-weather tyres.

That call, made in the closing stages of the race back in 2021, anticipated the heavy rain that was imminent and very nearly yielded a victory. It would have done so but for a safety car that closed up the field and then the heroics of Ferrari driver Alessandro Pier Guidi. A ballsy around-the-outside manoeuvre at Blanchimont gave the Prancing Horse victory with just 10 minutes remaining. 

WRT won the Spa 6 Hours last weekend thanks to an offset strategy which put its BMW in clean air

Photo by: Jakob Ebrey / LAT Images via Getty Images

WRT understood that the best of its flotilla of Audis wasn’t going to overhaul the leading Iron Lynx Ferrari run by AF Corse in normal circumstances. It knew it needed a slice of fortune if it was going to add to its tally of Spa victories. In the words of team boss Vincent Vosse, it “went looking for it”. Luck, that is. It was the same last weekend. The tactics it employed were a gamble, but this time it was one that paid off.

It made for an intriguing race, but also an exciting one at its conclusion. Frijns in the winning BMW had taken only two tyres at the car’s final pitstop made under the Virtual Safety Car. Track position was everything for the race leader, while those behind were able to react to what WRT had done and go for four new tyres. All obvious stuff from the tactical playbook.

There was an exception, however. No prizes for guessing that it was WRT pushing the envelope again. It opted not to change tyres on the sister car when Kevin Magnussen took over from Vanthoor, again in the name of track position. With a bit of help from a tactical gaffe on the part of Toyota, this ensured he was there right behind Frijns in the queue after each of the safety cars in the final hour to play rear gunner for the race leader. Magnussen proved equal to the task despite his ageing rubber.

The evidence of Spa suggests that Le Mans could well be wide open and we are going to have multiple manufacturers slugging it out for victory around Circuit de la Sarthe. Could it be five or six? Or perhaps even more?

Kamui Kobayashi played a similar role at the WEC curtain-raiser at Imola last month, if you remember. The Toyota driver went out on the same set of Michelin mediums on which Nyck de Vries had just completed two stints in the penultimate hour. By forgoing a tyre change, he got out ahead of Antonio Giovinazzi’s Ferrari 499P Le Mans Hypercar. That allowed Sebastien Buemi in the sister Toyota TR010 HYBRID LMH to eke out a bit of a gap up front and go on to secure the victory.

Toyota’s tactical calls at Imola were on point, just as WRT’s were at Spa. Neither would have won without pushing the boat out strategically. So that’s two WEC races out of two this year won by virtue of execution, execution, execution, and perhaps a little more execution besides. Which is absolutely fantastic.

And that’s not just because it made for a pair of intriguing races and, in the case of Spa, an exciting one to boot. Rather, it shows that the Balance of Performance, particularly in Belgium, has been doing something very close to its job. That is, of course, to provide a level playing field so that the aforementioned execution on the part of the drivers, the engineers and strategists, and mechanics determines who wins and who doesn’t. It should be regarded as a breath of fresh air after last season’s annus horribilis in the sordid history of the BoP. 

BoP is seemingly doing its job in 2026, though it's more of a secret than ever this year

Photo by: JEP

Think back to last season’s Le Mans 24 Hours, and Penske executed to perfection with the Porsche 963 LMDh shared by Kevin Estre, Laurens Vanthoor and Matt Campbell. Yet it could only finish second, 14s in arrears of the winning Ferrari 499P. Porsche argued that it should have won given that it did everything right and Ferrari most definitely didn’t. It even cited this as a reason for choosing the WEC programme over its participation in the IMSA SportsCar Championship in North America when it came to culling one in the face of financial problems for the brand.

I’m not averse to having a bit of a moan about the BoP, though my most recent one, you might remember, was a bit different. I wasn’t complaining about the numbers contained within it and what effect they have had upon the racing. My gripe was the fact that those figures were being kept a secret.

BMW won the Spa 6 Hours, but at different points of the race the smart money was on Cadillac, then Alpine. Ferrari didn’t look in the best of shape in qualifying, probably not a surprise given that it would have taken a hit under the BoP because it had the fastest car at Imola. Yet it was still able to come away with a podium and could potentially have won the race.

Toyota probably wasn’t going to leave Spa with a victory, but it looked on course for second until the final hour thanks to its own impressive tactical call early in the race. (The good work was undone when it then went a little too aggressive on strategy.) We had a Peugeot 9X8 LMH on pole position, though, again, there was nothing to suggest that it was going to win this one. Aston Martin collected its best result yet for the Valkyrie LMH with fourth place, its best WEC result yet, and looked for a while that it might achieve more than that after sending both cars out on the Michelin soft tyre for the run to the flag.

I’ve already mentioned seven of the eight manufacturers competing in Hypercar. The eighth, newcomer Genesis, got its first points on the board with eighth, the result of not changing tyres at its final stop. Execution, anyone? That I’m talking about everyone here has to be good news as we head for the Le Mans 24 Hours next month.

I’m not going to start making predictions, because there are just too many unknowns for that. Not least when it comes to the BoP. But the evidence of Spa suggests that Le Mans could well be wide open and we are going to have multiple manufacturers slugging it out for victory around Circuit de la Sarthe. Could it be five or six? Or perhaps even more? Here’s hoping…

Next up for WEC is the 'big one' on 13-14 June

Photo by: Nikolaz Godet